


Bruises

by junifers



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M, Romance, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-08
Updated: 2017-06-13
Packaged: 2018-11-11 08:26:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11144628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/junifers/pseuds/junifers
Summary: She would often find scratches on her hands that didn't sting when she touched them, or erratic bursts of blue that stretched down her arms like stepping stones. Sometimes they took up half her body, and were heavy and dark like the paint her father made for her with warm oil and sticks of pigmented wax, and she would ask her parents to pray with her for the stranger on the other side.As she got older she stopped praying, but she never stopped worrying.AU. Soulmates get superficial marks and bruises on their skin in the same place the other is hurt.





	1. Contact

Clarke remembered her mother's concern the first time she found the phantom bruises on her skin, angry purple spilling like still-flowing ink across her ribs on her left side as she changed before bed. She had bent to clutch at Clarke's shoulders when she showed her, swiping hurried fingers across the color as if she could wipe it away, but it wouldn't begin to fade for a week, and Clarke nearly cried for what she knew that must've meant. 

She was nine then.

In the years that followed she would often find scratches on her hands that didn't sting when she touched them, or erratic bursts of blue that stretched down her arms like stepping stones. Sometimes they took up half her body, and were heavy and dark like the paint her father made for her with warm oil and sticks of pigmented wax, and she would ask her parents to pray with her for the stranger on the other side. 

Her teachers quickly grew accustomed to the girl who wore the violence of someone surely older and with a quarter of her innocence, but most couldn't hide their stares—or their pity. They saw a child doomed, destined to love someone who was either being broken or who consistently enjoyed breaking other things, and her mother, too, would look at her with sad eyes and slumped shoulders, but Clarke never saw it that way. 

With each mark she would conjure up a story to accompany it; he was cleaning his room and bumped his elbow against a table. She was helping an electrician in a cramped crawlspace after school. He was a cadet training to become a guard, or maybe they weren't on the Ark at all, and they were a survivor on the ground—an adventurer on a green and freshly radiation-free planet, scouring things like forests and mountains and clouds for monsters to vanquish and a way to bring her down to them. 

She knew that that one was the least likely, but she liked it best, and she began pinning new drawings of a faceless figure in different settings on Earth above her bed.

Once when she was twelve and late for class she left her apartment without glancing in a mirror, and after the whispers in the halls and the sneers behind her back, after even Wells avoided meeting her gaze, she stood in the restroom behind one of the classrooms and stared at the black eye that stained the side of her face like a hole threatening to consume her until she couldn't think of an exciting story to explain it away. 

As she got older she stopped praying with her parents, but she never stopped worrying.

-

When she was fourteen she sprained her wrist falling off a bookcase to get to a book on the top shelf she thought she hadn't read before, and when her father found her he soothed the blossoming ache with his careful, calloused hands. 

"I'm glad they can't feel the pain," she said to him after he had called out for her mother, and he smiled grimly at her. 

She thought of them again a year later while she was volunteering at the med bay between school hours; a girl with a fever had bit her hard on the inside of her arm when she had helped a doctor restrain her, and when she traced over the divots in her skin with a finger later that night before falling asleep, she tried to imagine the matching bruises on someone else's.

She wondered if they worried about her like she did for them. 

If they thought about her at all. 

Then she was sixteen and the marks were forgotten, because her father was hugging her for the last time, and she was clawing at her mother's arms as she turned her face into her chest to keep her from watching as her best friend's father ordered the airlock door open. She nearly vomited when she saw splotches explode on her mother's neck and climb up her face like ugly vines, dripping up her cheeks like backwards tears until suddenly they were gone, and her father was gone, and Jaha let them cry together in the cold of the room until their mouths couldn't make the sounds anymore. 

After they locked her in the sky-box it hurt to look at the bruises that appeared for long; to think about how her mother would never see them on her own skin again, about how she would die in the same chamber as her father without knowing the reasons behind them, without learning her soulmate's story. 

She hated how much she still cared about a stranger.

She hated that it felt like betrayal when they didn't break out of their imagined place in her head to come and help her.

When they hadn't already stolen her away to the ground when she was a child.

But then her mother was holding her outside her cell, telling her that she was going to Earth, that she was going to live, and Clarke had never felt more uncertain.

-

Her seat in the dropship shook beneath her as they plummeted, and a boy was teasing her as he lounged mid-air, and Wells was making tears sting at the backs of her eyes as he shook the dust off things she wished could stay buried. When they crashed to the ground she was ready to roll over and sleep for a hundred years, but then she remembered her mother's last words to her, who she was, and she unclipped her seat-belt with a huff. 

A man—an _idiot_ was standing by the ship's door, reaching out to open it, and she called out from the back of the crowd to stop, to wait, _"the air could be toxic"_ , and when he met her eyes a jolt went through her, a half-quake in her legs that halted her only for a moment, because she thought she recognized his eyes, but not _him_.

But then he pulled the lever with his sister in the crook of his arm and she couldn't remember to care about who she knew and who she didn't, how long it had been since she had stood this long in a room that wasnt the width of her arms stretched out, the dead boys who had followed Finn out of their seats who lay crumpled behind her, because the door dropped open with a sound that was recycled air meeting _real_ air, and all she could see was green. 

She had always imagined what it would smell like most of all, because that was what the old maps and text-books couldn't show her; how it would taste on her tongue and feel filling her lungs, and her dreams had been like trying to catch water from a faucet in hands that couldn't close compared to the emerald ocean that spilled out seemingly without end in front of her, meeting with vibrance everywhere and all at once until she was sure there was no such thing as the color gray on the entire planet. 

She was hit with the sudden thought that it all had been waiting for them, that they had always been meant to be there—that _she_ had always been meant to be there, and she smiled a little smile for the first time in more than a year while the others danced between the trees. 

She didn't remember the marks until she was drawing a line in charcoal on a map between them and Mount Weather that in reality was twenty miles long. She stilled when she rubbed absentmindedly at the bruising beneath the metal band on her left wrist and realized it was all tender; all hers, and the lingering thoughts she had stupidly entertained that they had been sent down with her, that she wasn't truly alone were snuffed out with sudden and horrible finality. 

She tried to dismiss it, busied herself with making plans, with keeping herself well away from the lines the others began to draw between themselves in the sand ( _'the privileged'_ , the boy from the drop-ship door, Bellamy, had called her), but she caught herself watching too hard for the flash of people's wrists out of the corner of her eye, looking for one with a bracelet that hadn't been applied properly, or one without a bracelet at all.

She tried not to feel disappointment that her soulmate hadn't been condemned to her fate.

Not that being left behind on a dying space station was any better.

She cursed destiny and its cruel sense of humor.

-

As she walked behind Finn with the group meant to bring supplies back from Mount Weather she noticed the shallow scratches on his neck, electrical burns running in thick rivulets up his hands.

"Which ones are yours?" she asked, gesturing to his mismatched collection of hurts when he looked at her questioningly. The woods were still save for their footfall and the gentle chatter of conversation bubbling up from the others behind them.

He shrugged, watching the ground. "I don't know. I'm trying not to think about it."

"They're back on the Ark?" she said, more a statement than a question. 

He pursed his lips, nodded shortly, and she fell silent, untrusting of her lack of experience in the convoluted field of love to offer reassurance.

After Jasper made a joke that made Clarke secretly grimace and sent Octavia reeling, her laughter a loud and chortling breath of calm to sweep away the tension, Finn turned to her with a crooked smile. 

"What about yours? Did you find them yet?" 

She shook her head in a silent 'no', glancing up at the knitted canopy of branches above her. Some of the trees were peppered with white flowers, and occasionally a handful of petals would fall from them like how she imagined snow would. "Doesn't seem very important now."

"A princess who doesn't want a fairytale romance? I don't believe it."

She turned to glare at him until he threw his hands up in submission, shooting her a cocky grin over his shoulder as he broke away to saunter ahead. 

"Ass," she muttered under her breath after him, a growing quirk in her lips.

- 

After Octavia was nearly eaten alive and Jasper was taken, Clarke and the others returned to see that order was upheld expectedly less elegantly by teenagers on the ground than it was by a council in the sky. 

Bellamy Blake was stubborn, and save for his sister he didn't seem to care much about anything at all, and Clarke might not have tried so hard to stop him from getting his way if so many lives weren't at stake on the Ark, if the wristbands he was so set on erasing from existence weren't the only thing that kept her mother from resigning herself to death by suffocation in four months time, but he was right about one thing; she had been privileged, and the people wouldn't listen to her. 

"If they come down, she'll have it good," he said to them. "We can take care of ourselves. We're not criminals; we're survivors!" 

She had brought him and Murphy along to look for Jasper despite Wells' protests; she needed Bellamy's gun, and she would make sure not trust him enough to let him stab her in the back, and _he was a survivor_ , after all, but then Jasper was strung up half-dead in front her, and she had fallen into the grounder trap hidden in the leaves to get to him, and Bellamy was grabbing onto her arm like a lifeline. 

She swung into the packed dirt of the wall with a shout, feet scrambling for purchase above sharpened wooden spikes sticking up like teeth from the mud. When she looked up his eyes were raw and wild, and she could've sworn that for a moment he was considering dropping her, conflict burning across his face like hungry flames, but his grip was sure and snagged hard on her skin. As he pulled her up his jacket sleeve hitched and she saw that his left wrist was bruised and dotted with red, and she began to think about how he must've taken his wristband off with the others (of course he had, he started it all), but then she remembered that he never had a wristband.

He wasn't one of the hundred. 

He had stowed away on the dropship without them knowing to follow Octavia down.

She stared at the spot above his hand as he backed away and the others helped to steady her once she was planted on solid ground, pretending she didn't think about what it could mean as they worked to get Jasper free. 

She thought he hadn't noticed. 

-

It shouldn't have mattered; it could've been any one of them, anyone with a bracelet, but it stayed with her, pulling at the frayed edges of her mind as she lead them back with Jasper until she couldn't focus on where her boots landed and she stumbled over a mossy log in her path.

Bellamy would glance over at her every so often, but she wouldn't meet his gaze. 

Then she went to work on Jasper's wound in the dropship, willing her fingers to stop shaking as she cleaned and bandaged it, moonshine stinging the cuts on her palms, and when she smelled burning wood and heard the pops of melting fat dripping into fire, she came out to see that Murphy and Bellamy were giving sticks of meat from the cat Wells had shot only to those who gave up their wristbands.

That shouldn't have mattered either. 

But it did. 

Her throat burned with the taste of white-hot anger as she charged up to Bellamy and pushed him once on the shoulder, urging him back to the treeline and away from the crowd that had gathered around the roasting animal. He resisted at first, but he must've seen something in her face, her insistency, and he conceded with a chuckle that she saw shake his chest and felt radiate through hers. 

"Whoa, princess. If you wanted to get me alone all you had to do was ask-"

"You're an asshole," she said matter-of-factly, jabbing a finger up at him. His mouth gaped open half in surprise, half in amusement, and the spark in his eyes was dangerous. 

"You're getting braver by the minute." His voice rumbled like the beginning of a thunderstorm. 

She ignored him. "Did you hit your head on the trip down here, or are you purposely raising an army of psychopaths?"

He pretended to think about it, crossing his arms and tapping a finger to his chin. She let out a heavy breath. 

"You can't expect to keep this up, Bellamy. People won't just do whatever you tell them to forever, and once they realize you're using them and not leading them?" She shook her head. "You're setting them up to die out here."

He scoffed. "I'm not using anyone. This is what they are; this is what they _want_."

"Only because they aren't being given any other options, thanks to you and your merry band of morally-corrupt _idiots_."

"Yeah? And what would you suggest, princess?" 

She glared at him, matching his stance and crossing her arms against her chest. "We need rules."

He started. "And," she interrupted before he could get a word in. "Food _does not_ come at a price. Period."

The corner of his lip quirked up, a scar she hadn't noticed before there tugging at his skin, and he leaned closer to her face until she could even count his freckles in the dimming light if she wanted to. She shouldn't have wanted to. 

"And what makes you think I'm suddenly gonna follow your orders?" he half whispered. "There's no council down here. It isn't exactly a democracy, and as I look at it we've already got a system that works."

"It doesn't-"

He held up a finger. "And you're going to change that, how? By, what, holding a vote, running against me for Chancellor?" His smile dropped and his stare grew hard. "You didn't know what it was like for people like us up there-" he pointed up to the stars that glinted from between the tree branches, "-so you don't get to dictate what people like us do down here."

"That's not-"

"Fair?" He finished for her, his dark eyes flickering fast over her face, daring her to keep talking, and her mouth snapped shut. She balled her hands into fists by her sides. 

"Go cry to mommy about it."

Her palm shot out before she could stop it, slapping the side of his face with a strength that had coiled in waiting since she confronted him. 

His head whipped to the side, but otherwise it didn't seem to faze him, and he licked his lips and closed his eyes and stood still breaths from her. She pulled her hand back into her chest with the other in shock after it registered, her fingers burning from the contact, and she was inches away from apologizing when he made a sound like a constricted _chuckle_ low in his throat, and she decided that she really should've hit him a long time ago. 

But then he looked at her.

His pupils were blown with barely-restricted rage and something else she couldn't fathom, something chilling and scorching her all at once as he opened his eyes and caught her in his snares again, but then his gaze shifted to her cheek, and it was gone. Her brows drew together as she watched his jaw slacken, the harsh lines in his face melting away until it was utterly blank, a clarity she had never seen on him, and she stood frozen in confusion as he lifted a hand to hover over the side of her face. 

She felt the heat of it like he had touched her, the closeness making her remember herself, and she gasped fast between her teeth in realization. 

It was the same side she had slapped him. 

His fingertips ghosted over her skin, and she could imagine the red mark that bloomed there, imagine his stare tracing the shape of a handprint burnt into her face.

Because she was looking right at it, beginning to fade from his. 

A mirror image. 

She heard heavy footfall approaching, heard Murphy call out Bellamy's name and spit something indistinguishable at her, but she was afraid that if she looked away she would fall into the black hole that she could feel had opened up below her. Murphy went to grab her shoulder, meaning to push her away, but Bellamy stopped him with an arm across his chest, turning his head to glare at him, and his eyes narrowed into sharp pinpricks of black again.

"Don't," he said, and his voice was hoarse as if he had been yelling for hours. 

She took a breath she hadn't realized she was holding when his gaze finally pulled away like the rebounding snap of elastic, reaching out for his outstretched arm before she knew what she was doing. He flinched under her touch but he let her roll up his jacket sleeve, her hands frantic in the fabric until they stilled over a blotch of discoloration that pooled in his inner-arm, just above his elbow. 

Her thumb grazed over it, staring for a moment in disbelief before pulling back the sleeve on her own arm, holding it up next to his to reveal the matching bruise from when he had held her over the grounder trap, the edges of it yellowing and stark like a brand in the pale streaks of moonlight that rained down on them. 

Something tightened around her heart like a vice. 

"Holy shit," Murphy said as he backed away, and Bellamy looked up at her like he was seeing her for the first time, like he hadn't hated her every second since they landed in the dropship days ago (because he had, hadn't he?), and she wished that the black hole had swallowed her up after all. 

_Holy shit._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ 
> 
> This is my very first fanfiction, and I'm super nervous about how this is gonna progress, but I love this ship more than sleeping in and honestly I'm Very Excited about this au so !
> 
> Bellamy's pov next chapter <3


	2. Trapped

His mother had told him stories nearly every night on the Ark. 

He never saw her more alive—more _herself_ than when she was reciting Greek tragedies, counting off the names of lost gods and goddesses on her fingers; losing herself in history lessons he often thought too good to be true, but the way she spun words out of air like pulling thread from a spindle mesmerized him, and when she spoke he swore the stars couldn't compare to the fire behind her eyes, so he didn't mind that they probably weren't true. 

Secretly, he still hoped they were. 

When he was four he had an affinity for Hades; he liked his three-headed dog, the grim romanticism of a brother inheriting the loneliness of a domain he didn't choose, but he greatly disapproved of the whole business with Persephone. His mother had told him before tucking him in one night that maybe Persephone had a secret part of her that was dark like Hades, that maybe she knew what she was doing when she ate the pomegranate seeds and became his queen, but he didn't believe her. 

She would've been happier in the sun, he knew, than ruling over shadows with someone so miserable. 

She told him about soulmates only weeks before Octavia was born; before he stopped being a child, and stopped almost-believing. 

At the beginning, she said, humans were once twice what they are now; four arms, four legs, two heads, but only one soul. The gods that created them feared their strength and split them in two, but something remained that tethered two halves together, something that couldn't be severed. She told him that one day the marks would appear on his skin like they once did for her, that that meant he was soul-bonded, and that someone else would wear his in return. 

"How will I find them?" he had asked her, and she leaned forward from her place on the floor of their cramped room, sitting cross-legged in front of him.

"Just remember to keep this-" she pressed a slender finger to his chest, "- open _wide,_ and you'll know when you do."

He looked down, clutching at the spot in his shirt she had touched with a stubby hand. "How?"

She shrugged. "The same way you keep your eyes open when you're very tired, or you speak out against something that's wrong even when you know you'll get in trouble for it." He remembered her smiling then, and the memory was bittersweet. 

He shook his head. "But I'm not brave like you."

"You don't have to be," she said, grabbing him gently around the waist. "Fear isn't weakness, Bellamy. You only fear losing what you love, and it takes immeasurable _strength_ to love something."

She pulled him into her arms, and when he buried his nose into her shoulder she smelled like scratchy soap and warmth. She squeezed him once before leaning back to look at him, and the curve of her lips touched her eyes.

"Love _is_ scary," she whispered, brushing a mahogany curl from his forehead. "But it's not something you have to conquer by being brave. It just . . . is.

"All you have to do is not fight it."

When they floated his mother, the stories died with her. 

-

The first thing he noticed when the dropship door fell open was the sky. 

It was blue, and though he had seen the color before in children's books on the Ark, flashing on switch-board panels and sewn into the patch on his guard's uniform, this blue was different. It was warm and cool at once; welcoming and so strangely foreign, endless and open like the suffocating infinity of space wasn't, and free. 

It was freedom.

And he intended to make the most of it. 

He was a good leader; people followed him, listened to him like they never had on the Ark, and unlike the council and their Chancellor he didn't spoon-feed them lies about his intentions, his morally-stick-up-the-ass code of ethics. His code was simple: self-preservation— _whatever the hell we want_ , and it seemed to be working out just fine. 

Until her.

Until he saw her out of the corner of his eye everywhere he went, arguing with him every chance she got, contradictory and stubborn and self-entitled, vitriol on his tongue; until she was cornering him, slapping him across the face like she had the right, any sense at all, her bruises on his skin. 

Until she was looking at him.

He remembered the stories again, then.

-

Her eyes, unfortunately, were like the sky.

Unfortunate because of who they belonged to, because the sky was good and clear and _free_ and nothing about her was. 

Unfortunate because he couldn't look away. 

His forearm was bared next to hers in the starlight, the mottled purple of the twin bruise bleeding into the other as she pushed their clammy skin together, and _"Holy shit,"_ he heard Murphy say, but his mind hardly registered, jumbling the words until they were unrecognizable. His vision was blurred by a watery haze that swam endlessly in circles around _her_ ; her stare a burning blue focal point as the world turned upside-down, her hold on his wrist leaving his skin in fiery ruins, her bright hair twisting down the curve of her neck, sticking to the sweat that beaded at her chest and—her, her, _her._

_Clarke._

He flinched, the iron-hold she had on his muscles fizzling out as she began to pull away, the last wisps of their confrontation churning mercilessly in his gut until the fresh scratches on his pride spurned him to action, jumpstarted his nerve-endings, and he tore his arm away from hers before she could with more force than he meant to. 

He stumbled back, blinking when the short sound of Murphy whistling broke through the cotton in his ears. 

"The council-bitch's daughter? Really?" he said, deadpan, craning his neck lazily to appraise the mark on Bellamy's arm, and he clicked his tongue. "I would've put you down for something a little less frigid."

Bellamy bit down on the sudden, inexplicable urge to reach over and throttle him, struggling to school his expression into anything but hopelessly lost, or horrified, or whatever the _fuck_ it was he was feeling. He stole an uneasy glance at Clarke as he pulled his jacket sleeve back down with a single harsh movement; she hadn't moved, and it was almost like she was accusing him of something in the hard line of her mouth, the furrow in her brow, and he swallowed and averted his eyes. 

Then, "Bellamy?" he heard her say, and he froze. She sounded as confused as he was—more so in that moment because he had never heard her say his name without spitting it like a curse, without wanting to disembowel him with the sharp edge of her glare alone. 

He looked back at her, and immediately wished he hadn't. Her eyes weren't hard, and he couldn't recognize her like this, and he wished she would just go back to hating him because _this was so much worse._ She was pleading with him to do something—to acknowledge it, or explain it away, pulling the ground out from under him and leaving him scrambling for purchase where there was none. 

He clenched his jaw, burying the sympathy where it began to rise from the pit of his stomach. He could hate enough for the both of them.

Hate was easy.

Hate was control. 

Murphy caught him by the shoulder, jolting him back into being. "You're not planning on going soft now, are you?" he asked, only half-joking, and Bellamy shook his off hand coldly.

"No," Bellamy said, his voice breaking, and he pulled his gaze away from the sky in hers. He cleared his throat.

"This changes nothing."

Clarke let her arm drop to her side, the mark they shared plainly illuminated by the bouncing orange light of the fire, mocking him. Her lips opened and closed with the promise of words, of retaliation, and he waited, half-wanting her to say something, to yell at him again, to make him stay and—but, no; she swallowed it back along with the heat in her eyes, the smooth planes of her face unreadable, and she was silent. 

_So this is what it took to defeat her._

He tried pressing a grin to his lips, but it faltered. 

"If we're done here, princess . . . ?" he said, and he threw an arm out in an exaggerated bow and turned on his heels before she could answer. Before he could hear her voice again. 

She didn't follow him. 

_This changes nothing._

He sent Murphy back to fire and retreated from the crowds to the side of the dropship across camp, the touch of the metal chilling him through his jacket as he leaned against it. He squeezed his eyes shut, the muted wails of Jasper inching closer to death inside cutting into him in time with the pounding behind his ears. 

The look Clarke had given him before he left her etched in neon across his thoughts, standing there with betrayal written in every line of her like he had _wanted_ this, like he had cheated her out of Prince-fucking-Charming, and it was too much, and _there was no way._

_All you have to do is not fight it._

His fist connected with the wall with an ugly _thud_ , his knuckles splitting and smearing red, and he stood for a moment—let it reverberate through his bones, before he shook it off and straightened his shoulders. 

He tried not to turn to look for the fierce color of her eyes, the wild flash of her blonde braid as he walked up the ramp to find Octavia. 

He could see them without looking anyway. 

_This changes everything._

-

Clarke thought it for the best that Bellamy avoided her the next day. 

She needed to think—or better yet, not think, to find something to do with her hands, and she found her chance when they discovered that it wasn't the wound itself killing Jasper, but poison on the spear that had pierced him. She needed to find an antidote; the seaweed that had been applied as a poultice when they found him was promising, and thanks to Wells and Finn, she knew where to look for it.

The three of them were silent as they embarked into the surrounding woods. 

Her thoughts strayed to the events of the night before before she could stop them. 

Bellamy's reaction was . . . understandable, honestly; she didn't quite share his apparent _disgust_ in finding out that the metaphorical thorn lodged in her side had been her soulmate the whole time, but she thought it right that he made the choice to ignore it. There were more important things—people dying, and especially now with attack from the grounders so imminent, the camp needed leadership unburdened by . . . _that_ particular kind of personal interest, regardless of how objectionable that leadership was. It would be easier in long run, she told herself. 

It still hurt.

She remembered bitterly the childish daydreams of a brave adventurer waiting for her on a lonely green planet, the story her father told her about how he met her mother, teenaged laughter and pulling down collars to find matching scars criss-crossed on their shoulders.

The bruises that sometimes painted half her entire body blue at once. 

She wondered if perhaps it was a mistake, if even after everything it could still be a coincidence, if Bellamy's denial was truer than wounded pride and he knew something she didn't, but something inside her told her that it wasn't; something tight, and new, and that had wrapped itself around her spine and taken residence in her chest since he was just a man arguing with her over a closed door, really. 

Her destiny was a self-serving tyrant of slightly-less-obvious tyrants who wanted less to do with her than she wanted to do with him.

She could've laughed if it wasn't so sad, and she wasn't much of a laugher anyway. 

Finn clearing his throat brought her back to the present, and when she looked over he was spinning a twig deftly across his fingers. She heard footsteps crackling in the brush a ways behind them; Wells keeping his distance, probably. 

"So," he started. "Blake, huh?"

She groaned inwardly, wiping nothing in particular from her brow with the side of her palm. Her feet suddenly itched with the need to start running and not look back. 

"Who else knows?"

"Everyone, probably," he said, glancing over her with that stupid sideways grin. "Murderers and thieves are about as good at keeping secrets as you would expect. Pretty great at eavesdropping, though."

This time she groaned aloud, and he chuckled under his breath. He broke the twig in half at the middle with his thumb and let it fall. 

"Not exactly a prince, is he, princess?"

"No," she said dryly, watching between the trees as they walked. "He's not."

He fell silent beside her, thinking, and for a moment she hoped that it was the end of the conversation, but to no avail.

His gaze, when he turned it back to her, was unexpectedly concerned. 

"Sometimes two pieces just don't fit how they're meant to. People aren't constant, Clarke; we change. We lose parts of ourselves." He shrugged. "You and Bellamy might've just outgrown each other before you even had a chance."

His smile was sad, but she returned it, surprising herself when she found that the reassurance she felt, though slight, was genuine. 

_Love isn't exclusive to soulmates,_ he was saying. _You still have hope._

It helped, if only a little, and in a way that twisted strangely at the base of her stomach, but she was grateful for the attempt. She swayed a little so that her arm brushed his in silent thanks before they picked up their pace, Wells joining them once they met with the bank of the river. 

After she plunged in to get to the seaweed they needed, red and glistening like congealed blood on the swelling waters, success lifting some of the weight that had settled in her bones, she wondered how long she could go that day without thinking about Bellamy Blake again. 

She got her answer as she went to put the dripping plant away in her bag, the thicket that hugged the shore to her side rustling as three boys and a softer, much smaller figure—Charlotte, she remembered, spilled out onto the sand, weapons in hand. 

Bellamy was a few steps behind them. 

He still wore his jacket despite the afternoon heat, sweat tinging the ends of the curls at his face a deeper brown. 

His sleeve pulled down over the bruise on his wrist. 

Her lungs suddenly decided that they needed twice the air to function properly. 

Wells had dropped into a defensive stance in front of her at the sound of them approaching, but when he saw who it was he slowly straightened. 

"What are you doing out here?" He called out, eyeing the group as they made their way over to them. "Who's watching the camp?"

"Relax, _Jaha_ ," Bellamy said, the name a curse, and when Clarke's eyes shot up at the deep rumble of his voice she found that he had already been staring at her. He dragged his gaze over her once with a precision that made her skin crawl and her insides burn before bringing it to Wells, stopping to stand more than a few feet away; the distance a boundary-line, intentional.

The others hung back behind him, Charlotte closest on his heels, and Clarke wondered briefly at how he had managed that. 

"The camp'll still be there when we get back, and seeing as you three were busy _picking flowers_ -" he nodded to her pouch, "we thought we would take it upon ourselves to catch dinner."

She bristled, opened her mouth to speak, but Finn stepped forward before she could. 

"It's medicine for Jasper," he said, and Bellamy scoffed. 

"Then you might as well have been picking flowers."

"Listen, you insensitive-"

"What the fuck is _that?_ "

A boy from the group that she recognized, Atom, was pointing to the sky behind them, his face slackened by horror. She turned, her gaze catching on blurry movement across the tree-line, a smell that practically screamed 'toxic' curdling on the wind, and she paled.

A wall of sickly green was oozing through the branches, eating through the brush in its path like a swarm of angry locusts, advancing at a speed that shouldn't have been possible and _headed straight for them._

"Run," she heard herself say as the storm rose to blot out the sun, and when she looked back their eyes were wide with panic and trained on her. 

"Run!" she yelled, and they scattered. 

The clouds chased them, curling through the air with a sound like thunder, and she thought she felt Finn grab onto her arm as she raced into the forest, but when she looked back she was alone. She called out for him; for any of them, but all she could hear was the fog crashing into the trees seconds after she passed them, and her legs were beginning to shake beneath her, and something was choking it's way into her throat, making her cough around frantic swallows of rancid air, and-

Someone's hands were on her shoulders, jerking her suddenly to the side and around a mess of vines and leaves that hung over the entrance of-

A cave. 

She could _breathe._

The hands retreated, and she fell to her knees on the cold stone of the floor. Her fingers grasped frantically at her chest as she drank in a breath that was clean and sweet, her lungs singing at the taste, and when she went to start the seemingly impossible task of re-orienting herself, she found that hot pain shot through her skull like a knife when she moved her head. 

Not exactly a promising development. 

Spots of muted color danced in front of her eyes as she tested them against the dark of the tunnel, and after a moment she gave up and squeezed them shut. 

"Clarke," she heard someone say in Bellamy's voice, and a laugh nearly bubbled up past her lips at the prospect. She focused on the blood slowly returning to her upper-half, the strength building in her legs, shifting the distant hum of her consciousness until she was roughly certain that she was, in fact, still alive. 

" _Clarke_ ," the voice said again, annoying and _too loud_ , and she looked up, half-prepared to start berating the ghost her mind conjured up after too long deprived of oxygen, but the eyes that were waiting for her were real, and warm, and _Bellamy's._

He was flushed, and he wasn't wearing his jacket, and his freckles were hidden behind streaks of mud and scorched dust, but it was him. 

_Ah._ Not a ghost, then. 

Her brows knitted at the realization, the haze beginning to recede from her senses, and his joints popped in protest as he rose from his place, crouched by her head. 

He looked her over as he stood, expression unreadable.

"We should go further in," he said, stepping back; giving her room, and she leaned against the wall as she straightened, her head only slightly swimming. She glanced at him warily, conceded to the fact that saving her life (because he _had_ saved her life, hadn't he? The concept was disorienting in itself) was equal at least to some kind of temporary peace treaty, and nodded. 

He lead her down the passage, the eerily yellow light from the opening beginning to fade as they dropped deeper into nothingness. She panicked for a moment at her sudden blindness, but then her eyes adjusted and there was a glow, a faint flickering that emanated coldly from around a jagged corner just ahead. The tunnel opened up into a room not much wider than it, illuminated by a handful of irradiated plants that peppered the walls in chaotic bursts of blue. 

Artificial starlight. 

Charlotte was sitting by a natural ledge in the far wall, clutching Bellamy's jacket to her chest, and when she saw them she rushed forward, throwing her arms around Clarke's waist.

"Are you okay?" she said into her shirt before tilting her head up. "I was scared you were dead; we couldn't see you when we ran from the river."

Clarke glanced over at Bellamy before she smiled narrowly down at her, tucking a stray strand of hair behind her ear.

"I'll be fine. Thank you for worrying about me."

"Did you see any of the others?" Bellamy asked, the line of his shoulders tense. The room was dwarfed as he stood at the center of it. 

She shook her head, and he frowned, turning to sit with his back against the stone. 

Charlotte shifted beneath her touch, and Clarke looked down to see her gesturing for her to bend closer. She kneeled, and when Charlotte leaned in to whisper in her ear she curved a hand around her mouth in a way that made her want to laugh. 

"Bellamy was scared, too," she said; a secret, and she looked pointedly over at where Bellamy sat in the corner before grinning up at her toothily.

"Really?" she said, matching her voice in volume. "I bet he would never admit to it, though."

"Never," Charlotte agreed, and with that she sat, pulling Clarke down to the floor beside her.

Her headache had receded, but the weight in her chest hadn't; she hoped Finn had been clever enough to find some kind of shelter in time, that Wells, too, had made it, despite everything, and the rest of them; she could imagine the kind of death getting caught in an acid storm would bring, all melting flesh and ruptured blood-vessels, and she blanched at the thought. 

The morning, she promised herself. She would find them in the morning. 

And they would be fine. 

She noticed a patch of discoloration on the back of her hands as she rested them on her knees, and when she turned them she saw that it spread up her inner arms, climbing up to her elbows like fractured mosaic pieces.

Like chemical burns. 

Charlotte watched as she probed it with her fingertips, the flesh smooth and unbroken. 

"What is that?" she asked, swiping her own finger gently down the pattern. Clarke felt Bellamy's gaze turn to her sharply, but she didn't meet it. 

"I don't know. It isn't mine," she said, trying to keep her voice flat. 

Charlotte nodded, understanding. "Your soulmate."

"Yes."

"Aren't you worried about them?"

"Yes—or, _no_ -" 

She sighed at the puzzled look Charlotte gave her, dropping her hand from her arm. 

"They're very strong. They can take care of themselves."

"Why aren't you with them? I thought soulmates were supposed to stay together forever once they found each other," she wondered. 

Bellamy was staring holes into her, then, and she swallowed. She hadn't been prepared to ask herself these questions, let alone have a child corral her into a corner with them—while trapped in a cave. In the middle of an acid thunderstorm. 

With the catalyst of her brutal introspection sitting a few feet away from her. 

"I don't know," she admitted, and it wasn't altogether a lie. 

"Sometimes two pieces just don't fit how they're meant to."

-

She woke to the sound of Charlotte shouting. 

She jolted up, looking around dazedly when she found that she must've moved across the room from where she had curled up next to Charlotte in her sleep, her fingernails leaving crescent-marks in her skin as she balled her hands into tight fists against the opposing wall. She went to stand, but relaxed when she saw that Bellamy was already crouched over a slumped figure in the near-darkness, smoothing a wide hand down her arm and whispering softly. She strained her ears. 

"-the only thing that matters is what you do about it."

"But I'm asleep," she heard Charlotte say, hesitant. 

"Fears are fears. Slay your demons when you're awake, and they won't be there to get you when you sleep."

A nightmare then. She was all too familiar, and her heart tugged as she made out Charlotte wiping hastily at the wet tracks down her cheek in the glow of the plants. 

"You can't afford to be weak," Bellamy continued, the gruff baritone of his voice strangely thick, with sleep or emotion, she couldn't guess. 

"Down here, weakness is death; fear is death."

Her face scrunched in disapproval. 

The thought of a little girl being forced to face such a pessimistic shade of reality settled badly in the pit of her stomach, soured on her tongue, but she realized she didn't have much in differing advice to offer. 

_The cost of survival was negotiable, right?_ she thought resentfully.

He had given Charlotte the knife, told her to keep it close, to not be afraid, a mantra that she repeated until she felt it safe enough to close her eyes again, and once her breaths came even and slow with sleep, Bellamy stood to return to his place against the wall. 

She sat up to look at him. 

"What made you think that way?" she asked quietly, hollow satisfaction briefly flaring as he jumped slightly at her voice. 

He swept his gaze over to her, holding it for longer than was strictly necessary, and she shifted under the sudden attention. 

He leaned back into the curve of the stone, exhaling harshly through his nose. He seemed to think. 

"My mother and I were afraid all our lives that they would find my sister. We let it control us. And then they took her anyway." He shrugged. 

"Before we thought to try to _do_ something, it was too late. Because of fear."

She nodded to herself and looked away, thinking better of continuing, of trying to provide a contrasting perspective. He had enough ammunition on her already to dismiss her as being sanctimonious, and he had earned the right to be bitter, she supposed. 

Losing someone made you hard in a way that was irreversible, and she understood. 

It was still for a while, an unexpected ease rising with their mutual silence. She looked up at the cave's ceiling, following spinning motes of dust with her gaze; some of the plants hung from tethers of twisted vine, and when they swung gently the light they cast danced across weathered rock. The steady sound of Charlotte's breaths was almost soothing. 

"Thank you," she said, unthinking. When she peered down at him he was eyeing her strangely from across the room, an eyebrow raised, and she colored. 

Just a little. 

"For saving me," she clarified.

His eyes softened for a moment, the harshness of him threatening to crack, but then he seemed to remember himself and crossed his arms against his chest, distant again. 

"Don't get used to it," he warned. 

Just when she was beginning to think that he was only _half_ -asshole. 

She stiffened, nebulous anxiety rising again; the moment gone. "Considering your recent streak for nearly getting people killed, I won't make that mistake."

"Good."

"Fine."

She practically _huffed_ in annoyance, going back to drawing imaginary patterns in the ceiling until he shifted again, apparently agitated by the length of quiet. 

"You're ashamed of me," he seemed to say to no one in particular, and she turned to look at him, confused.

"What?"

He met her eye accusingly. 

"When you were talking to Charlotte. You couldn't even say my name."

She was stunned for a moment, and then she squared her shoulders to face him fully, her expression incredulous. 

" _I'm_ ashamed of _you?_ "

He seemed to sober a little at that, the crease between his brows lifting until it hinted at something like guilt, but she ignored it. 

"I was under the impression that you wanted nothing to do with me," she continued. "That you hated me, and now you want me to, what, shout from the treetops that we're _something_ but _not really_ because you've got self-esteem issues?"

He stared at her, a near-attempt to meet her challenge, but then he sighed, and he sounded tired. 

"I don't hate you," he admitted, and she stiffened. 

"I wish I did, but I don't."

She hesitated, caught wrong-footed as he suddenly looked far too weary for someone so young, and she was reminded of the years he had on her. She tried to ignore the sting of the confession, contrite but still . . . cruel? No, she couldn't fault him for being honest, especially knowing that he didn't exactly think highly of her to begin with. 

Worthless, then. 

She raised her arms so that he could see the marks that stained them— _his_ marks. 

"But you know what this means," she gestured in emphasis. "You know what this means and you don't care."

He leveled her with a serious look. "I care."

She nearly snorted. 

_That's rich._

She shook her head slowly in exasperation. 

"Then do something about it."

He looked away, closed his eyes; she knew he wouldn't, and she tried not to let that hurt, too. 

She let her arms drop, sighing in defeat, exhaustion suddenly pulling at her like an insistent tide from below. 

"I'm sorry," he said in the darkness, and when she glanced at him he seemed smaller, as if something had been slowly chipping away at him throughout the conversation. 

"So am I," she admitted. 

"If we had met before—if things were different . . ." he trailed off, and she nodded shortly. 

"Sure."

"I can't lose . . . I have to focus on keeping my sister alive."

She closed her eyes, too, then, lowering her spine back to the floor and curling up against the wall. 

"I know.

"Goodnight, Bellamy," she said flatly, and he took the hint. 

She slept.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Slightly longer chapter because I'll probably be too busy to update later this week !! Fingers crossed that it isn't too horrible. 
> 
> And thank you all so much for your support and comments on the previous chapter! I feel so welcomed, and I love you all to pieces <3


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